Goncharov's Main Theme - One Of The Most Beautiful Movie Themes From The 70s!

To be kind is more important than to be right. Many times, what people need is not a brilliant mind that speaks but a special heart that listens.

F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940) American writer (via macrolit)

Iliad mini comix, books 1-8! yes i am going to do all 24 books! pray for me!

more iliad stuff

more ancient studies comics

A Vulcan named Stork works at the Terran adoption agency. Parents always request that he be the one to deliver their child to them.

rb to tell ur mutuals ur fond of them

I should probably point out that I’m someone who likes the TV show, even if I think the books are largely superior, so we obviously don’t entirely agree on a lot of these points. (I do love your metas, Gotgifsandmusings, regardless of my enjoyment of the show; they’re consistently insightful and witty.)

As far as the Emmys go, a lot of it has to do with the nature of awards shows. Deserving winners get missed all the time because there’s competition that can’t be ignored. This is how you end up with awards that feel like “lifetime achievement awards” or whatnot.

So Game of Thrones Season 4, which (whatever its adaptational or sexism issues) really was spectacular television, lost all its awards to the final season of Breaking Bad, except for directing, which it lost to True Detective. Same thing for GOT Season 3, which, again, was terrific television. But it lost all of its nominations to other shows (including, again, Breaking Bad).

The thing is, no matter how great Game of Thrones was those years (and, again, as TV, it’s pretty great, and I think it improves on the books in a few areas, albeit definitely not in all areas), it was never going to beat Breaking Bad. There was just no possible way to ignore it.

And so when Season 5 rolled around, for all its flaws, it still tends to be entertaining and technically superb television when it wasn’t in Dorne or Winterfell (both plotlines were heavily criticized even among those who still love the show, and at least in the latter case, it’s certainly exceptionally well-made in a technical sense). And this time, there wasn’t a strong frontrunner to beat it (its competition is strong, but it’s not terribly obvious what the best choice there actually is), so it got all the awards it’s been nominated for all these years but never managed to actually win, even if it was the weakest season.

That’s just how these things work. Sometimes something wins that really deserves it -- Robert Donat won the Oscar for Best Actor in 1939 for Goodbye Mr. Chips. But he beat someone else who also really deserved it - Jimmy Stewart in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. So the next year, Stewart won Actor for The Philadelphia Story, and while he’s great in that, should he really have beaten Chaplin, Fonda, and Olivier?

So this year, Game of Thrones took a couple of massive misteps, and badly exposed all its underlying flaws in really ugly ways. It’s also, often, compelling, complex, fun, and dazzling. So even if it isn’t those things to any consistent degree, it still represents enough of what’s loved about the show that it’s able to pull off a sweep when it’s not up against anything that can’t be beat.

And Winterhell helped win the show an Emmy... What a great message to send to viewers and creators... "If you want to make good TV and win what is considered the most prestigious television award, rape someone! Have shocking things that make no sense happen! Cynicism and everything sucks! DARKNESS! Oh and viewers who don't like this stuff and are triggered by it? FUCK THEM AM I RIGHT?" Ugh...

Is Winterhell what helped them win their Emmys? I mean it was just so, so, so bad.

I’m pretty sure everyone and their mothers got distracted by HARDHOME, the BEST HOUR OF TELEVISION (if we turn our brains off and don’t bother thinking about context or like…why are arrows stopping wights, or anything).

But like…I have to hope that’s what one them the votes. Because I think it is actually physically impossible to enjoy Winterhell. Then again, the finale won “best writing,” and the first 20 minutes centered on Satannis’s farcical defeat.

@itsalwayslydia said to gotgifsandmusings:Hey, so I just finished reading your post on Winterhell, which was so good it made me angry. (Not at you but at what’s happened to these characters for the purpose of TV ratings.) Anyways, I was wondering if you’d seen the Huffington post article where it’s pointed out that Theon is wearing Robb Stark’s outfit from the Red Wedding? Sophie Turner confirmed that was true on her Comic Con panel: “Just to make that a little more brutal.” Seven hells.

I had seen that, yeah. And like…that’s you know. Nifty that they wanted to use costuming to “make it more brutal.” But it also makes no fucking sense? Like, why in Seven Hells is he wearing Robb’s outfit? He’s not disguising himself as a Stark. Why isn’t that outfit full of arrow-holes? How did they even get that outfit? Was it when Sansa had passed out from the Xanax Batfinger gave her so she failed to notice them passing through the Twins?

But like, at least it wasn’t as horribly out of place as the sith lord and the dude with the conquistador helmet:

Anonymous said to gotgifsandmusings:What’s the proper way to compliment your Winterhell Retrospective? I enjoyed it? It made me angry about that whole plot line all over again? Anyway, it did make me angry again, but I also enjoyed it. I still fail to understand how professional writers of TV could put together such a stupid arc, they have huge books to help them!! Why do they think they are better at telling this story than GRRM? Why did they retcon the Others? Why can’t we call them the Others, instead of the white walkers? ???

Well one quick correction: they don’t think they are better at telling “this story,” because they have no interest in telling the same story. They think they are better storytellers.

That aside…

#i like to sit around thinking about what life would have been like in the naberrie-skywalker household#padme would have been amazing when the twins were just little kids but when they hit puberty she’d be like ???#padme was a queen when she was 14; she couldn’t afford temper tantrums; she doesn’t understand any of this#and anakin stands up and he’s like MY TIME HAS COME#he is the chosen one prophecied to bring balance to this household#leia is the best at everything until anakin starts seriously training them and luke is a natural at Meditation and Jedi Stuff#and leia gets SO PISSED and luke’s like WHY CAN’T I BE BETTER THAN YOU AT ONE THING#and leia’s like WHY CAN’T YOU STOP RUBBING IT IN MY FACE#and then they yell incoherently at each other and padme’s like ????????? STOP???????????#she can get the senate to shut the fuck up and listen but she can’t get her 13yo twins to do the same#and then anakin walks in and starts yelling just as incoherently and padme’s like i’m leaving#but it works. whatever strange terrifying things they were all yelling at dinner everyone’s happy again#and padme’s like oh my god if politics were like this i’d kill all my coworkers#and anakin’s like hahahahahhahahaha.#and in another universe darth vader stops and stares out a window and he’s like huh. that was weird#‘it’s as if i felt padme again and we were in complete agreement on something’#and then he continues choking out an admiral#STAR WARS COMEDY

my friend left her window open in her bedroom and came back to find this

look at his self-satisfied little face, the cheeky shit

motherfucking australia

Zach Snyder Sandwich

I originally posted this on the cracked forums in a discussion about the new Justice League movie, in particular the very mixed reaction to Man of Steel and Zach Snyder's work in general.

_____

I think the things that make Snyder both loved and reviled by such a variety of people can be explained in a metaphor. Movies are like sandwiches. There are basically three layers on which movies work:

Style. The visuals, the music, the pacing, the swell of emotion, etc. This is the bread – it won’t singlehandedly save a bad sandwich/movie, nor is it absolutely necessary that it’s brilliant, but it adds a lot to the experience, and some people experience a movie primarily like this. 

Text. What the characters actually say and do, the story itself, and so forth. This is the meat, cheese, vegetables, condiments, all the substance. The actual quality and depth of the dialogue belongs here. 

Subtext. What the writer/director is actually saying under the surface, whether intentional or not. This is the nutritional content. You usually have to be looking for it to properly appreciate this level of storytelling (or sandwich making), but it makes it a richer experience. 

Most people experience movies in a mix of the first two levels. But people who really love movies and take the time to examine them tend to appreciate the third level a lot more. And different people care about different things. The film critic known only as Vern is the guy who wrote Seagalogy, which examined the movies of Steven Seagal for their themes, both individually and running, and took them seriously and critically as art. (It’s one of the best and most entertaining works of criticism I’ve ever read.) Like many Zach Snyder fans, Vern tends to be most interested in Style and Subtext, and wrote both a positive review and a later counter-post about some of the common arguments against it. The same goes for Phil Sandifer, who wrote an interesting defense of Man of Steel primarily on subtextual ground.

These levels can mix together different ways. Steven Spielberg movies are very consistent: the Style, Text, and Subtext are all doing exactly the same thing, and the result is a very smooth experience, regardless of quality (which is generally excellent).

But you don’t have to be that consistent to make it work. Take the Somewhere Over the Rainbow scene from Face/Off. The Style is beautiful and magical, while the Text is a kid watching a bunch of people getting brutally murdered. Consequently, the subtext is about how the pervasive tragedy and horror of violence affect even those who aren’t involved and may not even understand what’s happening, and the jarring contrast makes this all the more provocative.

Paul Verhoeven is a master of this sort of thing. Robocop, on the surface, is one of the most badass action flicks of the ‘80s. The text strongly resembles an unusually well-done Superhero origin story, with strong characters, memorable dialogue, and taut plotting. But the Subtext is a rich and hilarious satire of American culture that’s constantly criticizing its own story. It's a terrific movie on any of those three levels, but put together they become something truly special. It's like Judge Dredd enacting the life of Christ.

So a Spielberg Sandwich tastes different every time, but it’s always a perfectly balanced mix of ingredients, and it tastes exactly as healthy as it is (which also varies). A Verhoeven Sandwich tastes like junk food, but is surprisingly nutritious. A Michael Bay Sandwich is actually an entire bag of Oreos. The first bite is so delicious, but by halfway through you start to feel sick, by the end you actually are sick, and Heaven help you if you try a Bay marathon.

On those three levels, Zach Snyder is brilliant at Style, very clever at Subtext, but utterly clueless about Text, and ignorant about how the three fit together. Take Watchmen. It’s a gorgeously stylized realization of the comic, and all the rich themes are intact. But the violence (for example) is all wrong; one of the main themes is the awful pointlessness and tragedy of violence, and in the comic, it’s horrifying. That theme is still there, but Snyder shoots it fetishistically, Rodriguez-style, reveling in long fight scenes and beautiful splashes of blood and gore. The result is less provocative than confounding. Like, are we supposed to be having fun, or not? Similarly, the casting seems spot-on, yet the acting is incredibly uneven, because Snyder doesn’t adapt the dialogue to the rhythms that work when spoken aloud, and doesn’t adjust the flaws in the comic. Malin Ackerman got a lot of crap for her performance, but she plays Silk Spectre II perfectly as written. SS2 is a poorly-written character in the comic, spouting comic-book style dialogue.

Or Sucker Punch. It looks great, and thematically it’s an angry and brilliant condemnation of misogyny and sexism, but the characters are one-dimensional, the plotting is video-game level, and it fetishizes the characters too much for the criticism to actually stick correctly.

There’s probably no better representative of the good and bad points of Man of Steel than Jonathan Kent. Stylistically, Snyder’s vision of this small-town Kansas farmer is beautifully realized, full of gorgeous imagery and inspiring-sounding speeches about hope, all climaxing in his mythic death by tornado while saving others. And Kevin Costner pours his heart and soul into the role. But textually, he’s a stubborn jackass who tries to convince Superman to not save people. He dies because he goes back to save the dog, while telling Superman not to save him for no damn reason whatsoever. Meanwhile, the subtext is a provocative condemnation of the concept of small-town middle America being the heartland of the country; it’s turned ultra-conservative, and conservatism has degenerated into moral bankruptcy while loudly proclaiming its morality. So either the American heart is deeply corrupt, or Kansas ain’t in Kansas in more, if you catch my drift. (I’m not sure I catch my drift)

For some people, that imagery combined with Costner’s soulful performance makes the character work. For others, that subtext is intriguing enough to make it worthwhile. For the rest, it’s absolutely infuriating for obvious reasons – you hate him for being awful, and you subconsciously hate him for making the story so slow and pointlessly grim.

And, more to the point, doing all three of those together just doesn’t work. He can’t be the inspirational heart of the movie, and one of the principal antagonists, and also a satirical take on American Conservatism, while having anything remotely to do with god-like aliens punching each other over whose genocide is the morally correct one. The other problems largely fall into that.

So some people eat their Man of Steel Sandwich and go, “Man, this bread is off the hook!” (or whatever you kids are saying these days) Others say, “For something with this much junk in it, it’s surprisingly nutritious, and wrapped in a crust that’s quite exquisite.” And everyone else is like, “This is a terrible sandwich! Sure, the bread is good, but it doesn’t go with these ingredients at all! The meat is month-old bologna! The cheese is great (the cheese is Russell Crowe), but it’s only on the first half. There’s way too much lettuce, the tomatoes are bad, and the jalapenos somehow aren’t even spicy! And even if, for some insane reason, you actually want mustard, ketchup, mayo, and salsa on the same sandwich, you don’t drown the entire thing in all of them. By the end, you can’t even taste the bread!”

But hey, at least it’s not a bag of oreos.

We need to bring back private rail cars as the cool, sexy, exclusive way to travel, so instead of dumping the carbon budget of a small nation in the global south on private jets, celebrities have to attach their luxury pull an cars to the back of an Amtrak. Then the celebrities will lobby for Amtrak lines to be better

Seriously when did this

Become sexier than this

Like isn't it nice to watch the scenery, to be able to open a window and have fresh air, to be able to stand up all the way, not have your ears pop?